Selected Posts from the Midd Blogosphere

Category Archives: updates

A number of programs of study make use of technologies for recording audio. Some faculty have recorded their lectures, others have recorded class discussions. Language faculty have recorded samples of the language they are teaching for students to listen to and reproduce in their own recordings or have required students to record themselves reading words, phrases or passages from various texts. Some faculty teaching writing courses have asked their students to record themselves reading their own writing. Finally faculty in various departments have had their students produce podcasts. For more details, see:

We invited others to send us more examples of the use of audio capture at Middlebury or comment on any of the case studies included in this usage analysis. We also invite anyone in the Middlebury community interested in or knowledgeable about this topic to participate in our focus group sessions later this month.

The Language Schools and language departments have long been innovators in the use of technology. I have reviewed many of the language learning resource sites that have been created over the years and drafted a description of some of the ways Segue has been used for language instruction, see: Language Learning Resources

I invited others to send us more examples of language learning resources at Middlebury or comment on any of the resources listed on this site.

Welcome to all the new and returning PWTs! I hope you notice that we have some PWT info on our new college website. You can think about what other info you would like on this site, and we can make additions to it at any time. Next year’s Head Peer Writing Tutors, Emma Drucker and Josh Aichenbaum, are abroad this semester, but are excited to be heading up the program next fall.

While you are having a great semester, I’ll be on leave working on a Jane Austen project. You are left in the excellent, experienced hands of Catharine Wright, a member of the Writing Program and CTLR faculty. Catharine will be training and supervising the PWTs this semester as well as taking on the responsibilities of the Associate Director of Writing. Catharine has a long history of working with Peer Writing Tutors in her classes, and she was one of the leaders of the Tutoring Creative Writing Workshops last spring. You will have a great time working with Catharine this spring, and I look forward to seeing you next fall.

To help us understand the functional requirement of platforms and applications that will be needed in the future including those that will replace Segue, we have started to do some curricular technology usage analyzes.

The first usage analysis we have done is an overview of Segue usage. Over 5000 sites have been created in Segue since it was introduced in 2003 at Middlebury. Over 12,000 individuals have created Segue user accounts. About a third of the sites created in Segue have been for courses, another 30-40% have been for personal sites and the remaining have been for “custom” sites which could include department and area sites or curricular resource sites.

The Library and Information Services (LIS) Curricular Technology (CT) team will be leading the project to phase out Segue and find one or more replacements for it. The team will definitively use the Middlebury Web Makeover project as a model for how to engage the college community in this critical transition (for more information on why we are doing this, see: Segue Decommissioning). Indeed many of the team members are actively involved in managing different aspect of the transition to the new college site.

Currently the team is reviewing the many course sites and curricular resources that have been developed over the years at Middlebury in Segue and other platforms. From this review we hope to get a sense of how faculty and students are using technology in their teaching, learning and research.

Based in these findings the team will help coordinate the formation of curricular technology focus groups to define the functional requirements for platforms replacing Segue. We also hope that these focus groups will help draft a set of survey questions that we can send out to the entire college community. Our goal is to engage as much of the college community as possible.

Project Timeline

The CT team is committed to making recommendations for Segue replacements by the end of the Spring semester (May 2010). We will be publishing a more detailed timeline in the next week or so.

We will have completed the core technology development that we need to launch the site, and the majority of major websites will be sufficiently converted to allow the new site to replace the old site. We intend to inform faculty, staff, and students on Monday February 1st that they should start looking at the new site in order to prepare themselves for the switch later in the week.

We are asking all departments, programs, and offices to keep refining their sites in these last days leading up to the launch, and to continue to send us your questions so that we can help you finish up your site. Please check here for the schedule of WorkSessions in LIB 105.

As you wrap up your site, let Tim Etchells (tetchell@middlebury.edu) know and we will as time allows review your site and offer helpful suggestions and advice. In addition, we’ll be running a link and spell checking program on the entire site within the next few days, and we will let you know what issues that program identifies.

We also ask that you limit the changing of URLs in your site, as other sites are making links to your pages, and when you change the URL, the links to your pages break.

Thanks again for all your hard work in getting us to this point. We are almost done!

Thank you to everyone who has been working hard in getting us to this point with the new web site. If you would like some inspiration, I recommend opening the old and new web sites in two different browser windows. As an example, compare:

We are getting very, very close to being able to launch the new site. We have to finalize some designs and programming, and then do some final testing and clean-up work. Depending on how good our estimates are, you can expect to see the new site up and running in early February. Part of what we’ll be doing between now and then is testing the new site, and so you may hear again from us asking for help in identifying bugs, broken links, formatting problems, and other issues that inevitably crop up when one moves an entire website to a new platform.

Most people have completed their sites to the point where they feel comfortable launching. We have scheduled some afternoon worksessions for small changes in content, and to receive feedback from people in Communications on the design of their pages. (If you are behind on just converting to the new platform, you can of course also use this time to do that work!)

This will be the last round of worksessions before we launch the site to the public!

When you have completed your site, please send an email to Tim Etchells ( tetchell@middlebury.edu ) and someone from Communications will review your site. Please be aware that if you have not maintained the standards found in these guides ( http://midd2.middlebury.edu/questions ) someone from Communications may make changes to your site.

If you are for whatever reason unsure as to whether or not you will finalize your site for launch in the next week or so, we need to know this. Please update the status of your site by going to http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tPrMaJqCP-MLZK0BFlerdNQ and say when your site will be finalized, and what resources you may need to finalize it for launch.